Gamification of education is a developing approach for increasing learners' motivation and engagement by incorporating game design elements in educational environments. With the growing popularity of gamification and yet mixed success of its application in educational contexts, the current review is aiming to shed a more realistic light on the research in this field by focusing on empirical evidence rather than on potentialities, beliefs or preferences. Accordingly, it critically examines the advancement in gamifying education. The discussion is structured around the used gamification mechanisms, the gamified subjects, the type of gamified learning activities, and the study goals, with an emphasis on the reliability and validity of the reported outcomes. To improve our understanding and offer a more realistic picture of the progress of gamification in education, consistent with the presented evidence, we examine both the outcomes reported in the papers and how they have been obtained. While the gamification in education is still a growing phenomenon, the review reveals that (i) insufficient evidence exists to support the long-term benefits of gamification in educational contexts; (ii) the practice of gamifying learning has outpaced researchers' understanding of its mechanisms and methods; (iii) the knowledge of how to gamify an activity in accordance with the specifics of the educational context is still limited. The review highlights the need for systematically designed studies and rigorously tested approaches confirming the educational benefits of gamification, if gamified learning is to become a recognized instructional approach. Keywords: Gamification in education, Gamifying learning, Critical literature review, Empirical studiesThe idea of incentivizing people is not new but the term "gamification" didn't enter the mainstream vocabulary until 2010. Only a year later it became a viable trend. The growing popularity of gamification is stemming from the belief in its potential to foster motivation, behavioral changes, friendly competition and collaboration in different contexts, such as customer engagement, employee performance and social loyalty. As with any new and promising technology it has been applied in a diversity of domains, including marketing, healthcare, human resources, training, environmental protection and wellbeing. Gamification is a multidisciplinary concept spanning a range of theoretical and empirical knowledge, technological domains and platforms and is driven by an

Learning is a goal driven social activity determined by motivational factors. To be able to efficiently gamify learning for improved student motivation and engagement, the educators have to understand the related aspects studied in games, motivational psychology and pedagogy. This will help them to identify the factors that drive and explain desired learning behaviors. This paper presents a survey of the main approaches employed in gamification and the emerging new directions in the context of the relevant motivational psychology and pedagogy. The focus is on the motivational factors that impact learning and understanding of behavior change. The purpose of the paper is two-fold: on one side, to provide analysis and guide to relevant works related to gamification along with outlining the emerging trends, and on the other, to provide foundation for evaluation and identification of the areas of possible improvements.

In this article, we describe TM4L, an environment for building, maintaining and using standards-based, ontology-aware e-learning repositories. It is based on the idea that concept-driven access to learning material implemented as a topic map can bridge the gap between a learner and targeted knowledge. One of the driving goals of this work is to increase the reusability of available educational resources by enabling the use of a developed subject ontology with courses on the same subject with different stricture. Another goal of TM4L is to support an efficient context-based retrieval of learning content tailored to the needs of a learner working on an educational task. The paper focuses on three aspects of the TM4L environment: domain modelling, editing capabilities and the interface for exploring the learning collection. The key features of the TM4L functionality are illustrated with some examples. IntroductionInformation-seeking is the process through which individuals seek to find information in order to clarify or confirm knowledge about a specific topic. In this paper, we focus on information-seeking as a goal-driven behaviour, the goal being the resolution of a problem resulting from a particular task. Therefore, the goal of information-seeking is seen as being achieved by locating relevant or useful information. Our interest in information-seeking is related to task-performing information support in e-learning, ie, support for a learner's exploration of a topic of interest in order to solve an educational task. In this context, information-seeking is an activity that originates from a task that generates an information need and entails some form of strategy (Garcia & Sicilia, 2003), including how and where.

This paper brings together research from two different fields-user modelling and web ontologies-in attempt to demonstrate how recent semantic trends in web development can be combined with the modern technologies of user modelling. Over the last several years, a number of user-adaptive systems have been exploiting ontologies for the purposes of semantics representation, automatic knowledge acquisition, domain and user model visualisation and creation of interoperable and reusable architectural solutions. Before discussing these projects, we first overview the underlying user modelling and ontological technologies. As an example of the project employing ontology-based user modelling, we present an experiment design for translation of overlay student models for relative domains by means of ontology mapping.

Gamification of education is still evolving. It lacks systematic studies assessing its effect in different learning contexts. Creating gamified courses is still difficult, since there is a lack of sufficient understanding of how to gamify learning and appropriate software support is missing. As a response to these challenges, we developed OneUp  ̶ a customizable platform aimed at facilitating the process of gamifying academic courses and enabling contextual studies on educational gamification. In this paper we rationalize our approach to building OneUp and present the underlying principles and motivations guiding its design. We also describe the platform functionality which includes support for integrating game design elements in learning activities, creating dynamic problems, and visualizing student performance and progress. At the end, we present a usability study of the platform and the assessment results from an end user perspective.